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We have, of course, already seen that a secondary must follow
upon the First, and that this is a power immeasurably fruitful;
and we indicated that this truth is confirmed by the entire order
of things since there is nothing, not even in the lowest ranks,
void of the power of generating. We have now to add that, since
things engendered tend downwards and not upwards and, especially,
move towards multiplicity, the first principle of all must be
less a manifold than any.
That which engenders the world of sense cannot itself be a
sense-world; it must be the Intellect and the Intellectual world;
similarly, the prior which engenders the Intellectual-Principle
and the Intellectual world cannot be either, but must be
something of less multiplicity. The manifold does not rise from
the manifold: the intellectual multiplicity has its source in
what is not manifold; by the mere fact of being manifold, the
thing is not the first principle: we must look to something
earlier.
All must be grouped under a unity which, as standing outside of
all multiplicity and outside of any ordinary simplicity, is the
veritably and essentially simplex.
Still, how can a Reason-Principle [the Intellectual],
characteristically a manifold, a total, derive from what is
obviously no Reason-Principle?
But how, failing such origin in the simplex, could we escape
[what cannot be accepted] the derivation of a Reason-Principle
from a Reason-Principle?
And how does the secondarily good [the imaged Good] derive from
The Good, the Absolute? What does it hold from the Absolute Good
to entitle it to the name?
Similarity to the prior is not enough, it does not help towards
goodness; we demand similarity only to an actually existent Good:
the goodness must depend upon derivation from a Prior of such a
nature that the similarity is desirable because that Prior is
good, just as the similarity would be undesirable if the Prior
were not good.
Does the similarity with the Prior consist, then, in a voluntary
resting upon it?
It is rather that, finding its condition satisfying, it seeks
nothing: the similarity depends upon the all-sufficiency of what
it possesses; its existence is agreeable because all is present
to it, and present in such a way as not to be even different from
it [Intellectual-Principle is Being].
All life belongs to it, life brilliant and perfect; thus all in
it is at once life-principle and Intellectual-Principle, nothing
in it aloof from either life or intellect: it is therefore
self-sufficing and seeks nothing: and if it seeks nothing this is
because it has in itself what, lacking, it must seek. It has,
therefore, its Good within itself, either by being of that order-
in what we have called its life and intellect- or in some other
quality or character going to produce these.
If this [secondary principle] were The Good [The Absolute],
nothing could transcend these things, life and intellect: but,
given the existence of something higher, this
Intellectual-Principle must possess a life directed towards that
Transcendent, dependent upon it, deriving its being from it,
living towards it as towards its source. The First, then, must
transcend this principle of life and intellect which directs
thither both the life in itself, a copy of the Reality of the
First, and the intellect in itself which is again a copy, though
of what original there we cannot know.
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